Tag Archives: kindle fire

As with any other year, 2011 saw the release of all sorts of tech and gadgets. From more mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras to an onslaught of tablets and e-readers, we saw a lot. But what device can be singled out as the most important? Apparently, it's the 2011 MacBook Air.

One thing is trying to improve the performance of the Silk browser, but its just mind blowing how attempting to "improve" it would cause a Fire user such grief that they would easily choose an alternative browser, like side-loaded Opera Mobile with its hardware accelerated Web page rendering. More radical ways of accelerating Web browsing experiences for the Amazon Kindle Fire could be offered by flashing an Ice Cream Sandwich based custom ROMs on Fire, thus rooting it. That is, when these ROMs would be available for public consumption.

It was an early Ice Cream Sandwich build demoed at Liliputing couple of days ago. Since then, the development efforts were concentrated on elimination of serious flaws of this 'pre-alpha' build of ICS by JackpotClavin

It was expected sooner than later, but now it's become reality. By hard work and determination of Android Police's own in-house hacker named (appropriately) Justin Case and helpers like Vashypooh, Trevor Eckhart, and IOMoster of TeamWin, the rooting of Amazon's Kindle Fire has become possible once again.

Justin Case also dares to challenge Amazon that 'just in case' Amazon would try to 'fix' the feature, his current root exploit is based upon, he has another root exploit he feels he would be compelled to release.

In its AppStore, Amazon chose to never show its competion's eReaders apps: Wattpad's, Kobo' reader, and Bluefire ePUB and PDF reader. After some talks of Amazon and Wattpad, the alternative eReaders now showing in the Amazon's collection of apps, apparently available to download to Amazon Kindle Fires.

It was reported at XDA-Developers forum yesterday that the OTA (OTA=Over-The-Air) update for the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet to its 6.2.1 version of firmware has killed its rooting procedure, a so called SuperOneClick. It's worth mentioning that rooting in itself is not the real target for all those tinkerers at XDA-Developers and elsewhere. It's just a tool that facilitates running alternative firmware on the Fire, namely CyanogenMod 7 and coming CyanogenMod 9 (based on Android Open Source Project for Ice Cream Sandwich). It improves handling the device in its sideloading mode, and, conversely, sideloading some system apps might take rooting and superuser privileges essential.

In this past year, tablets have dominated sales over e-readers. Estimates are made that Amazon Kindle Fire has sold over 2 million units, and Barnes & Noble has sold a million of its NOOK Tablet. Both vendors were also successful in selling their previous models at the discounted prices. However, you shouldn't forget another very popular tablet -- the HP Touchpad, fire sales of which were bringing over 700,000 tablets in the hands of eager customers. Then, as the numbers of RIM Blackberry Playbooks sold at similar numbers to HP's Touchpad, the popularity of having a well rounded more powerful device has grown significantly.

In the past we covered an XDA Developer forum member's semi-successful attempt to get the CM7 ROM running on the Kindle Fire. Now it seems that Jeff Benjamin has taken things a step further and has even posted a detailed tutorial and video for installation of the CyanogenMod 7 (custom ROM) on Amazon Kindle Fire here.

It seems that a very early build of ICS running on Amazon's Kindle has now surfaced, thanks to the efforts of XDA developer g1011999 (or stevenlin here). While early and not fully functioning, it still shows very good progress already.

Amazon is debuting a new holiday shopping app that is geared towardas kids. “Amazon Santa” is a free app for Android and iOS that allows children and their parents to create holiday Wish Lists to share with friends, family, and Santa Claus as well.

A team named Dingleberry (immature name, I know) made up of three mysterious guys nicknamed as xpvqs, neuralic, and cmwdotme have succeeded to gain access and reverting some Blackberry OS system permissions.